Agents of pollen dispersal

Beetles and flies

The ancient principle of trapping insects as a means of ensuring pollination was readopted by some advanced families (e.g., orchids and milkweeds), and further elaboration perfected the flower traps of primitive families. The cuckoopint (Arum maculatum), for example, attracts minute flies, which normally breed in cow dung, by means of a fetid smell. This smell is generated in early evening, along with considerable heat, which helps to volatilize the odor ingredients. The flies visiting the plant, many of which carry Arum pollen, enter the floral trap through a zone of bristles and then fall into a smooth-walled floral chamber from which escape is impossible. Gorging themselves on a nutritious stigmatic secretion produced by the female flowers at the base of the chamber, the flies effect cross-pollination. Late at night, when the stigmas no longer function, the male flowers, situated much higher on the floral column, proceed to bombard the flies with a rain of pollen. The next day, when smell, heat, and food are gone, the prisoners, “tarred” with stigmatic secretion and “feathered” with pollen, are allowed to escape by a wilting of the inflorescence (flower cluster). Usually the escaped flies are soon recaught by another inflorescence, which is still in the smelly, receptive stage, and cross-pollination again ensues. Superb timing mechanisms underlie these events. The heat-generating metabolic process in the inflorescence is triggered by a hormone, calorigen, originating in the male flower buds only under the right conditions. The giant inflorescences of the tropical titan arum plant Amorphophallus titanum similarly trap large carrion beetles.

In general, trap flowers victimize beetles or flies of a primitive type. Although beetles most likely were involved as pollinators when flowering plants as a group were born, their later performance in pollination has been disappointing. Some modern beetles do visit smelly flowers of an open type, such as elderberry and hawthorn, but with few exceptions they are still mainly pollen eaters. Flies as a group have become much more diversified in their habits than beetles have. Female short-tongued flies may be deceived by open-type flowers with carrion smells—e.g., the flowers of Stapelia and Rafflesia. Mosquitoes with their long tongues are effective pollinators of certain orchids (Habenaria species) in North American swamps. In Europe, the bee fly (Bombylius) is an important long-tongued pollinator. Extremely specialized as nectar drinkers are certain South African flies; for example, Moegistorhynchus longirostris, which has a tongue that is 60 to 70 mm (2.3 to 2.7 inches) long.

The voraciousness of flower beetles demonstrates the futility of enticing insect pollinators solely with such an indispensable material as pollen. As a defensive strategy, certain nectar-free flowers that cater to beetles and bees—such as wild roses, peonies, and poppies—produce a superabundance of pollen. Other plants—e.g., Cassia—have two types of stamens, one producing a special sterile pollen used by insects as food, the other yielding normal pollen for fertilizing the ovules. Other flowers contain hairs or food bodies that are attractive to insects.

Bees

In the modern world, bees are probably the most important insect pollinators. Living almost exclusively on nectar as adults, they feed their larvae pollen and nectar; some species also make honey (a modified nectar) for their larvae. To obtain their foods, they possess striking physical and behavioral adaptations, such as tongues as long as 2.5 cm (1 inch), often hairy bodies, and (in honeybees and bumblebees) special pollen baskets.

The Austrian naturalist Karl von Frisch has demonstrated that honeybees, although blind to red light, distinguish at least four different color regions, namely, yellow (including orange and yellow green), blue green, blue (including purple and violet), and ultraviolet. Their sensitivity to ultraviolet enables bees to follow nectar-guide patterns not apparent to the human eye. They are able to taste several different sugars and also can be trained to differentiate between aromatic, sweet, or minty odors but not foul smells. Fragrance may be the decisive factor in establishing the honeybee’s habit of staying with one species of flower as long as it is abundantly available. Also important is that honeybee workers can communicate to one another both the distance and the direction of an abundant food source by means of special dances.

Bee flowers, open in the daytime, attract their insect visitors primarily by bright colors; at close range, special patterns and fragrances come into play. Many bee flowers provide their visitors with a landing platform in the form of a broad lower lip on which the bee sits down before pushing its way into the flower’s interior, which usually contains both stamens and pistils. The hermaphroditism of most bee flowers makes for efficiency, because the flower both delivers and receives a load of pollen during a single visit of the pollinator, and the pollinator never travels from one flower to another without a full load of pollen. Indeed, the floral mechanism of many bee flowers permits only one pollination visit. The pollen grains of most bee flowers are sticky, spiny, or highly sculptured, ensuring their adherence to the bodies of the bees. Since one load of pollen contains enough pollen grains to initiate fertilization of many ovules, most individual bee flowers produce many seeds.

Examples of flowers that depend heavily on bees are larkspur, monkshood, bleeding heart, and Scotch broom. Alkali bees (Nomia) and leaf-cutter bees (Megachile) are both efficient pollinators of alfalfa; unlike honeybees, they are not afraid to trigger the explosive mechanism that liberates a cloud of pollen in alfalfa flowers. Certain Ecuadorian orchids (Oncidium) are pollinated by male bees of the genus Centris; vibrating in the breeze, the beelike flowers are attacked headlong by the strongly territorial males, who mistake them for competitors. Other South American orchids, nectarless but very fragrant, are visited by male bees (Euglossa species) who, for reasons not yet understood, collect from the surface of the flowers an odor substance, which they store in the inflated parts of their hindlegs.

Wasps

Few wasps feed their young pollen or nectar. Yellow jackets, however, occurring occasionally in large numbers and visiting flowers for nectar for their own consumption, may assume local importance as pollinators. These insects prefer brownish-purple flowers with easily accessible nectar, such as those of figwort. The flowers of some Mediterranean and Australian orchids mimic the females of certain wasps (of the families Scoliidae and Ichneumonidae) so successfully that the males of these species attempt copulation and receive the pollen masses on their bodies. In figs, it is not the pollinator’s sexual drive that is harnessed by the plant but the instinct to take care of the young; tiny gall wasps (Blastophaga) use the diminutive flowers (within their fleshy receptacles) as incubators.